Originally Posted by
Letters
The nuance is in the reason for it, the conditions in the camps and the temporary nature of people's stay there.
Saying people are being rounded up in to camps - and Wengerbabies calling them concentration camps - is emotive language designed to invoke shades of the Holocaust. Obviously this is nothing like that. There's a clear difference between people being rounded up into camps because of their race, treated like animals or worse in those camps and then being killed and what is happening in Australia.
The reason people were being rounded up in Nazi Germany is because their was a policy to exterminate an entire race of people. I would argue that's a bad thing. The reason for the policies in Australia are because they are trying to contain a pandemic. I would argue that's a good thing. And their hardline policies have demonstrably worked - their death numbers are orders of magnitude better than ours.
Overall do I think the policy is good or bad - if you want to be binary about it then I agree, it's bad.
If there's a global pandemic which is airborne then there are different ways of handling that. One extreme is to basically do nothing, keep the borders open, let it rip through the population naturally, hope herd immunity sorts itself out. In the case of Covid I don't believe that would have been the right approach. Listening to testimony from people who work on the front line, this this feels like a situation which required some response.
The other extreme is lock everything down. Close the borders, literally lock everyone in their houses. That is clearly going to work - if people aren't meeting then a virus is not going to spread. But it's not practical and is an unreasonable restriction on people's liberties.
So I would suggest some middle ground is needed - which is what pretty much every country has done.
Some governments - like ours - have in my view erred towards the former approach. It seems like Johnson didn't want to lock people down, he wanted to go full herd immunity before realising things were getting pretty grim and then locking things down too late. He did it twice last year. The result of that was we were for some time in the "top" 5 countries in the world in terms of deaths per million.
Australia have erred towards the other extreme. Yes, it has worked. They've had very few deaths. But was it worth the effect on people's mental health and the economy? Was it worth restricting people's liberties for so long? I don't think so.
What was the "right" thing to do? It's really hard to say, this is a complicated situation, no-one alive has any experience of dealing with something like this. But I think locking down harder and earlier would have been better. Closing the borders - or at least implementing some quarantine - earlier would have been better. Hopefully then we'd have got away with shorter lockdowns, fewer restrictions on our lives.
But the underlying point here is that all countries were dealing with a situation. That is the reason they have done these things. Australia aren't putting people in camps because they've suddenly gone full Hitler. Johnson didn't ban weddings and close pubs because he wanted to stop us enjoying ourselves. He might be a self-serving incompetent oaf but he's not actually a tyrant. So sure, we can discuss whether our government - or any government - got things right. We can lament the way they dished out PPE contracts etc to their mates. You have a point about some of the legislation they have slipped through when no-one was looking. But to suggest that this is a "slippery slope" into an authoritarian regime is a stretch. There has been no slippery slope, the restrictions have consistently followed the data. Right now we can basically do what we want. Boris is doubling down on his "do nothing and hope it all goes away" from last Winter. He might just get away with it this year.